Tabbed windows coming to iChat?

I'd think that we'll be looking forward to a lot more advanced options in iChat very soon, considering they've had the original creator of Proteus working on the team since before Tiger's release. Incidentally Proteus was my IM client of choice for over a year, as a paid customer, until it's author left for Apple and sold Proteus to a new dev team and things went drastically down hill in following releases, I have since migrated to the most excellent Adium (which still lacks a good hotkey option, but I have gotten around that with third party tools).

The only other issue that ichat has is not being able to log in two or more accounts at the same time. That and tabing is what is keeping em from using iChat. Adium all the way...

I would personally like to see the multi-network features of iChat refined-it's really annoying to have to have two windows open to connect to two networks-that's why I use an all-in-one client, darnit! Just on the off chance an Apple developer's reading, of course.

My question is... Is there anyway to organize the groups in iChat or am I stuck with them in alphabetical order?

This is old news. There's hints of tabs in iChat in the 10.4.0 release - if you dig into there, you can find what looks like a class name for a tabbed view, as well as what appears to be a non-functional hidden preference.

The biggest thing needed for iChat (behind tabs, naturally) is message grouping. iChat has way too much white space in the chat windows, and if one person writes two or three messages in a row, iChat simply wastes too much space in displaying it. The way Adium does it in the Mockie style (and others, I think most do it) is perfect - coloured backgrounds denoting who said what, making it crystal clear for the viewer, and removing the need for large emoticons, "Mike says:" text, etc. Perfect. To be honest it's this interface which really disappoints me in iChat. The actual text chat hasn't been majorly overhauled since iChat was introduced in 10,2 - two OSs, or to put it another way, $260 ago. It's about time we saw SIGNIFICANT improvements in the iChat text interface - after all, this is still the mainstay of an IM app. I should note though that these resources don't prove that tabs are going to be introduced in 10.4.3, merely that it's been thought of. How long has that WMA icon been in iTunes? The cynic in me says we will be waiting until 10.5. I hope I'm wrong.

I really hope Tabbed chats find their way to iChat. I use iChat all day long at work plus have six screens going with Desktop Manager. I lose my individual chats amongst the windows like crazy. Tabbing would save the day. And yeah, I know Adium already does it, but I prefer iChat to Adium.

Tabbed chatting has been a hidden option in iChat since the beginning of Tiger. I have no clue why Apple does not release it!

i havn't used ichat in a while (adium), but does iChat allow grouping now? if so, that and tabs will get me back to adium (depends if i can live without customizing)